We propose that a "social exchange heuristic" is as important as the cheater detection mechanism for attaining mutual cooperation in social exchange. The social exchange heuristic prompts people to perceive a mixed-motive situation, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), as an Assurance Game (AG) situation in which cooperation is a personally better choice than defection insofar as the partner is...

Promising serves as an important commitment mechanism by operating on a potential cheater’s internal value system. We present experimental evidence on what motivates people to keep their promises. First, they feel that they are duty-bound to keep their promises regardless of whether promisees expect them to (promising per se effect). Second, they care about not disappointing promisees’expectati...

A recent study suggests that aggression between wasps depends upon the costs and benefits of fighting, as determined by the position of individuals in a dominance hierarchy.

We propose a model where dialog obligations arise from the interplay of social goals and intentions of the participants: when an agent is addressed with a request, the agent's decision to commit to the requester's linguistic and domain goals is motivated by a trade-o between the preference for preventing a negative reaction of the requester and the cost of the actions needed to satisfy the goals.

In this paper, we consider three hypotheses to account for the evolution of the extraordinary capacity for large-scale cooperation and altruistic social preferences within human societies. One hypothesis is that human cooperation is built on the same evolutionary foundations as cooperation in other animal societies, and that fundamental elements of the social preferences that shape our species'...

R.A. Adams and S.C. Pedersen (eds.), Bat Evolution, Ecology, and Conservation, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7397-8_12, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract To be evolutionarily stable, cooperative behavior must increase the actor’s lifetime direct fi tness (mutualism) or indirect fi tness (altruism), even in the presence of exploitative, noncooperative “cheaters.” Cooperators can ...

Interventions to increase cooperation in social dilemmas depend on understanding decision makers’ motivations for cooperation or defection. We examined these in five real-world social dilemmas: situations where private interests are at odds with collective ones. An online survey (N = 929) asked respondents whether or not they cooperated in each social dilemma and then elicited both open-ended r...

Cooperation is usually explained from an economic perspective focused mainly on the tangible outcomes received by individuals that are also dependent on the behavior of others, with little reference to the actual behaviors used when cooperating. The potential consequences of social dimensions associated with cooperative behaviors are minimized in Skinnerian and game-theory models by means of an...

Studies of animal behavior consistently demonstrate that the social environment impacts cooperation, yet the effect of social dynamics has been largely excluded from studies of human cooperation. Here, we introduce a novel approach inspired by nonhuman primate research to address how social hierarchies impact human cooperation. Participants competed to earn hierarchy positions and then could co...